In recent years, the use of the Internet for a variety of purposes has expanded considerably. These purposes include research, communication, entertainment, and electronic commerce. As consumers and other users have connected to the Internet, commercial entities have increasingly sought to use the Internet as an advertising medium to present advertisements to those users.
Internet advertising methodology typically involves presenting banner advertisements (i.e., “banner ads”) on documents retrieved from Web sites that experience high volumes of Internet traffic. Banner ads may take a variety of forms, and often include a graphic displayed at a portion (e.g., the top) of a Web page. Banner ads may be managed by the administrator of a Web site or other entity (e.g., DoubleClick, Inc. of New York, N.Y.), and may be presented at times and/or under circumstances specified by the advertisers. Typically, an advertiser agrees to make a small payment to the administrator of a host Web site each time that a banner ad is presented to a user, and/or agrees to make a payment to the administrator whenever a user accesses the advertised content using the banner ad (e.g., by clicking on the banner ad using a mouse). Since different Web sites attract different segments of the consuming public, an advertiser often chooses to place its banner ads on particular Web sites based on an evaluation of which Web sites are likely to provide the greatest exposure to its potential customers.
At many Web sites, banner ads are presented to users in a “static” fashion, so that every user is presented with the same banner ads. At other Web sites, however, banner ads are presented to users in a “targeted” fashion, so that different users will be presented with different banner ads. For example, a Web site hosting a search utility may present a particular banner ad to a user based on the search terms entered by the user on the Web site. In this application, each potential advertiser may register for a particular keyword with the search utility such that, when a user enters a keyword on the Web site, the search utility will present the banner ad of the advertiser having registered for that keyword. For example, a casino resort may register the keyword “poker” such that a user who is searching for rules pertaining to a particular variation of poker may receive a tailored banner ad for the casino resort, along with the search results that were deemed to be pertinent by the search utility.
Although this form of Internet advertising has proven popular, it suffers from drawbacks. One drawback is that some advertisers who seek to advertise online have been unsuccessful in targeting their desired consumer audience. For example, some advertisers have been unable to find sufficiently popular Web sites that are relevant to the goods or services being advertised. Another drawback is that the cost of advertising through popular, well-known “portal” sites on the Internet, such as sites operated by large Internet service providers (e.g., AOL) or large searching/indexing services (e.g., EXCITE™, YAHOO!®, ALTAVISTA®, etc.), may be excessively expensive, particularly for a retailer of a wide range of products that wants to register many keywords, or for a retailer of a niche product who wants to advertise to a niche audience. Also, an advertiser may, because of budgetary or time constraints, choose only a subset of Web sites where its target consumers may be found. Further, Web site administrators may be burdened to tailor advertisements to each particular visitor, and may present advertisements indiscriminately or inefficiently, thereby reducing the value of these advertisements. Thus, current Internet advertising methods often fail to successfully connect advertisers with their targeted consumers.
There have also been proposals for collecting information about consumers in order to tailor advertisements and to deliver other content to the consumers based upon known or suspected preferences of the consumers. The proposals generally suggest collecting demographic information such as age, income, home address and occupation, and preference information such as favorite colors and preferred content delivery mode (e.g., audio or video). The information is then used to tailor delivery of information to the consumer by selecting from a variety of available content and advertisements provided by the Web site visited by the consumer or provided by an associated content or advertisement publisher. U.S. Pat. No. 5,717,923, issued Feb. 10, 1998 to Dedrick, discloses such an approach. Unfortunately, such approaches have not been widely used, perhaps due to the complexity and added effort required of a Web site administrator or Internet Service Provider (“ISP”) to implement and administer such an arrangement, or due to privacy concerns arising from the use of consumer-specific information.
As part of efforts to optimize the interpretation and display of content posted on Web pages, Web browser software often provides a variety of “preference” settings by which a user may adjust various aspects of his or her browser software. These preferences may allow a user to control security settings of the browser software, to change the format of Web page display (e.g., color choices for displaying hyperlinks), or to change printing format(s). Browser software may also permit a user to store content received from a Web site, so that the content may be reviewed at a later time, or may be retrieved and manually modified (e.g., so the user can insert the content in a new file document or Web page). Browser software may further support the installation of third-party enhancements or “plug ins” to expand functionality of the browser software.
One “plug in” for browser software, which is referred to as “Flyswat” and is available from Flyswat, Inc., may be used to enhance Web pages being viewed with browser software to incorporate hyperlinks not included in the originally-authored Web page. These hyperlinks, for example, may provide cross-referencing from a product name to a vendor of that product. All Flyswat users, however, receive the same set of hyperlink enhancements, and thus all of the users are treated identically, much as in the case of static banner ads originated by Web site administrators. Thus, this “plug-in” enhancement fails to adequately target consumers that are being sought by particular advertisers.